New England Serial Killer Rumors: Are They True?

When Michele Romano went missing last August, her family and their close friend, podcaster Lauren Lee Malloy, labored over flyers bearing her image: a woman with a gentle smile and a spill of braids, wrapped in a cozy, pale rainbow cardigan.

“So many people shared the flyers, but she was never in the media,” says Malloy, who launched a podcast last year investigating her own mother’s 1993 death. “The family was so hopeful that the news would pick up her story, that they would help find her.” The nightmare didn’t end when Romano was found, though; her remains were discovered in the woods alongside a Rhode Island highway in March.

While local police and a private investigator work to discover what happened to Michele, the Romanos were stunned to see that same image from the flyers posted to Facebook groups dedicated to catching a serial killer a few weeks following the discovery of her remains. “Take my sister Michele’s name and pictures off of this effing website right now. She was not killed by a serial killer,” wrote her sister Valerie on one such page. Seeing her sister’s face posted alongside fevered theorizing was jarring and upsetting. While Valerie declined to comment via Malloy, Malloy emphasized this sentiment on a call with Rolling Stone. “[Valerie] told me yesterday, ‘The rumors going around do nothing but torture us all over again. We can’t even grieve. It’s only been two weeks since she’s been found, and we still have a long road ahead, because we don’t even have her body to bury her.’”

No one is sure exactly where it started — one member of law enforcement points the finger at TikTok — but around a week ago, rumors began swirling on social media and in the press about a serial killer stalking New England. There’s at least one private Facebook group with 60,000 members and growing, along with breathless videos cropping up on TikTok featuring amateur sleuths offering up their own theories. Still, it’s unclear whether these rumors are rooted in fact — and if such videos and posts are doing more harm than good. “We’re in a situation where Michele’s family is playing Russian Roulette every time they reload their social media feeds, just wondering who’s the next media outlet that’s going to share Michele’s photos without our permission,” Malloy says. “They had to beg for people to help and share her flyer for months, and now this is what’s happened.”

The facts of the alleged serial killer theory, with no embellishments or theorizing, are simple: Over the last few months, the remains of several people were found across New England, from recently deceased individuals to skeletal remains. There was Paige Fannon, 35, of West Islip, New York, who was found on March 6 in the Norwalk River — that same day, a human skull was spotted in a wooded area in Plymouth, Massachusetts. And then, on March 19, an unidentified body was found near a cemetery in Groton, Connecticut. On March 20, Denise Leary, 59, was found dead in New Haven. Romano, 56, was discovered on March 26, while another set of unidentified remains were found in Killingly, Connecticut, with another mysterious body located off the Massachusetts Turnpike in April. Soon, social media groups — and publications — started lumping these cases together, despite repeated law enforcement claims that they are unrelated.

In fact, every police department reached by Rolling Stone denied rumors of a pattern, aside from the Rhode Island State Police, who did not respond to several requests for comment. “There is no evidence to support the fact that any death investigation in the City of Norwalk is related to a serial killer,” says chief of police James Walsh. Officer Christian Bruckhart of New Haven made a similar statement. “There is no indication that the woman’s remains found in New Haven are the result of a homicide,” he says. “Denise Leary was suffering from some mental health diagnoses and her remains were found near where she lived. The office of the chief medical examiner performed an autopsy and was unable to establish an exact cause of death, but the investigation is consistent with her death being an accident.” 

Meanwhile, a representative from the Connecticut State Police says that the Killingly remains are also unrelated. “We can confirm that human remains were discovered, and there is no known threat to the public,” he says. “This investigation is in the early stages and remains active and ongoing.” And then there’s Groton Police Chief Louis Fusaro. “There’s multiple agencies investigating different parts of this,” he says. “What I can tell you is there’s been multiple incidents, including some that we’ve investigated involving missing people, that folks on social media seem to perceive as a serial killer. I can tell you we don’t have any evidence of that.”

“This Is Not a Game”

Despite all that, Facebook groups are ballooning with members offering up theories and even confessing to the deaths via elaborate poems and word puzzles. “It’s like a creepypasta where you have people with anonymous accounts posting things, trying to pretend they’re like a serial killer, which is, in turn, causing all these police departments to get this flood of calls, so who knows if they’re missing real calls,” says Malloy. “Some group members have realized exactly how damaging this is, and they’re trying to control it.”

Take the creator of that private page with more than 60,000 members, Jennifer Mitchell of New Hampshire. “Not sure what the fate of this group is at this point,” she wrote after one prankster claiming to be a serial killer teased the group with alleged confessions earlier this week. Several members alerted the police in Narragansett, Rhode Island, about the posts, which seemed to point to more bodies in that area. “Even though we believed it to be a hoax/false we conducted a search of the area with our detectives and also used two K-9 cadaver dogs from the Rhode Island State Police to check the area, which was all negative for any clandestine gravesites,” Detective Sergeant Brent Kuzman says. “We wanted to ensure our community safety and quell any potential fears. 

Still, the damage was done, and police wasted valuable resources. “I was really hoping that it wasn’t true, and I’m glad they didn’t find anything,” she says. “But it’s still pretty sickening that someone did that.” She originally created the group back in 2020 in part due to the spate of young male college students who were found dead in bodies of water in Boston around that time, the work of what some people dubbed the Smiley Face Killers. (There were often graffitied happy faces at the scene, but it’s still just a theory that anyone was involved in the deaths.) She’s not a fan of true crime, she says, she just wants to help victims get justice.

In recent weeks, though, her group has doubled in size, and while in the past there were only two or three posts per day, Mitchell and her new moderators now have to wade through 60-plus comments ranging from helpful to libelous. “People will share people’s license plates, pictures of their faces, accuse them of being a serial killer,” she says, adding that she’s frustrated with the amount of misinformation she now has to shuffle through — including that Romano was the victim of a serial killer. After Valerie posted her message to the group, Mitchell has been working overtime to take down any image of Michele she sees.

That hasn’t stopped people from weaving their own stories about the deaths, though, in some cases trying to connect them to previous New England serial killers, like the Valley Killer, an unknown person who was linked to seven murders along the Connecticut River Valley in the Seventies and Eighties, and the New Bedford Highway Killer, who was responsible for at least nine murders in the late 1980s. That killer was also never caught. But Maureen Boyle, who wrote Shallow Graves: The Hunt for the New Bedford Highway Serial Killer, isn’t buying the New England serial killer theory. “People are found along highways and in the woods all the time,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean that all these cases are related, and it doesn’t mean that there’s a serial killer on the loose. Too many people are making a game of it. This is not a game. We have families who are grappling with grief who are now being revictimized.”

Boyle speculates that the serial killer narrative is so popular because it presents us with a singular boogeyman. “It is much easier for people to think there’s just one person out there, and, if we catch him, everything’s going to be safe,” she says. “And that’s just not true. There are serial killers around. But they’re not as prevalent as people might think. There are also a lot of crazy people out there that are killing people.” Also, she says, people just find the idea entertaining, thanks to shows like Dexter and true crime documentaries. “It’s a type of killer that the general public doesn’t really understand,” she says.

Malloy, for one, is troubled by folks who find entertainment in tragedy. She became active in efforts to solve cold cases and find missing people around the time her podcast, My Mom’s Murder, blew up in 2024. She was initially told her mother died of a heart issue when she was a child, only to learn that she may have been murdered. That case has since been reopened and Malloy went on to become a K-9 handler for the Rhode Island Canine Search and Rescue team and secretary for the Licensed Private Detectives Association of Rhode Island. 

Malloy also moderates a Facebook Group dedicated to one of the New Bedford killer’s alleged victims and noticed an influx of new requests to join following rumors of a new murderer. One request troubled her deeply: under reasons for joining, a woman wrote: “I love this stuff.” “I don’t know how you can read the family’s pain and say ‘I love this stuff,’ but it just showed how desensitized people are to the reality of true crime,” she says. “Victims’ families are in these groups. They’re seeing the things that are posted. These are their loved ones. It’s a TikTok to you, but it’s somebody else’s mother or sister or daughter, wife, friend.”

Still, some folks caution not to dismiss the idea of a serial killer out of hand — or the power of social media to help solve crimes when used properly. Peter Valentin, a senior lecturer of forensic science at the University of New Haven, spoke to the news about the case — clips of which began circulating on TikTok. “It’s difficult to be definitive,” he tells Rolling Stone of the serial killer theory, explaining how law enforcement will have to furnish both physical evidence connecting the deaths as well as a pattern in who has died to confirm such an idea. “It would be silly to close off any potential source of useful information,” he adds, referring to social media. “However, you have to be mindful that not every demographically similar death is [necessarily] related to what we’re dealing with right now. Still, there’s some interesting breakdowns in communication that occur over state lines, over jurisdictional lanes, that mean that two cities that aren’t all that far apart from each other had similar situations, and they didn’t realize it.”

One thing is clear, though: Michele Romano’s face only became national news after the public decided she was the victim of a certain kind of tragedy. After I spoke with Malloy on the phone, she texted me a photo of a bouquet of white roses on the ground where Michele was found — an alternative to the image that has been hijacked by social media.

“Something about the white roses against the dark, wet ground really struck me,” she wrote underneath the photo. “I sent it to Valerie after I paid my respects, but I’ve never shared it publicly. For all the thousands of people who’ve shared Michele’s photos without ever knowing her, there were only three other bouquets at that spot…. It’s easy to share something online. It’s a whole other thing to stand at the spot where a mother, sister, and daughter’s remains were found and feel her very real family’s grief.